The “Apartheid Wall”, intended to be about 350 miles long and which confiscates 60% of the occupied West Bank's land and encloses numerous communities in several enclaves or Bantustans, is being built at great speed. Already almost 100 miles have been completed in the north and south West Bank and in the Jerusalem area.
Salfit in the north West Bank and Budrus in the West Ramallah district, are two places in Occupied Palestine where women and girls are playing a strong role in…
“Can you dance your tragedies? Can you dance your dreams? If you are Palestinian, you almost have no choice but to try doing both, for if you do one without the other, you choose to indulge in obsessive victimness or naive illusion” [From the introduction to El-Funoun's latest production]
On 9 March 2004, El-Funoun will celebrate its Silver Jubilee. For a quarter of a century, El-Funoun has indeed danced some of the Palestinian tragedies and dreams, challenges and ambitions. But…
I spent last summer as a volunteer on the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel. Participants in this World Council of Churches initiative spend three months living in the region to try to learn more how the conflict affects ordinary people.
On a day-to-day basis we were monitor-ing violations of human rights and international law, providing protection by our presence, and supporting both Israelis and Palestinians in their non-violent acts of resistance to the…
As a Palestinian dance choreographer working in the midst of conflict, I am often asked: what is the rationale of your artistic engagement under the circumstances?
If “engagement” with something is interpreted in a passive sense, as a mere relation to that thing, then the question implies a certain degree of volition in deciding whether or not to relate to issues of conflict and trauma. I personally do not think that in a situation of conflict artists have a choice of whether or…
In January 2004 Rudi Friedrich met Gush Shalom activist and member of the Refuser Parents Forum Adam Keller at his home. A few days earlier five refusers, Haggai Matar, Matan Kaminer, Noam Bahat, Adam Maor and Shimri Tzamaret were sentenced to prison terms of one year by a military court - after more than 14 months' detention already - for their refusal to “serve” in the Occupied Territories. Rudi asked Adam to discuss the situation and relevance of the refuser movement.
RF: How…
It is January 2004, the sun is shining and it feels like a warm day in Jerusalem. We are starting our journey early in the morning, to meet up with Ghassan Andoni from the Palestinian Centre For Rapprochement Between People, based in Beit Sahour. He has invited us to come to Bir Zeit, a Palestinian University close to Ramal-lah, where he is a professor of physics.
Ramallah is not far away from Jerusalem, just 20 kilometres. The town is located in the occupied territories and can…
In the face of the lack of progress in any official “peace process” in Israel/Palestine, there have recently been some unofficial proposals prepared - by peace campaigners or by less entrenched politicians on each side. The highest profile of these initiatives, the Geneva Accords, came from a group including former Israeli and Palestinian Authority ministers last November.
The aim was to provide a tangible demonstration that, contrary to Israeli claims, a partnership for Israeli-…
The principal focus of non-violent campaigns in Israel-Palestine is the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip. However, given the lack of symmetry between the situation of the Israelis (the occupiers), Palestinians (the occupied), and outsiders, actors from these different parties cannot apply similar roles and methods of intervention.
In this article, I will follow the categorisation offered by Amos Gvirtz, founder of Israelis and Palestinians for Nonviolence…
Bernard Shaw once said, “If you break a nation's nationality, it will think of nothing else but getting it set again. It will listen to no reformer, to no philosopher, to no preacher, until the demands of the nationalist are granted. It will attend to no business, however vital. Except the business of unification and liberation.” 1
Many Palestinians have conducted a non-violent campaign against the Israeli occupation, on the personal, NGO, political party, community…
This book is a collection of interviews with Israeli soldiers who at some stage decided to refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories.
Some of these soldiers are familiar to readers of WRI's co-alert email lists, as their imprisonment was reported to generate support. Others were lucky and didn't spent time behind bars (so far). None of the soldiers interviewed in this book is a pacifist. All of them continue to serve in the IDF. Still, this book gives some insights into their moral…
During the 1948 war that resulted in the establishment of the state of Israel, some 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes and became refugees. Following the 1967 war in which Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip many more Palestinians were displaced. There are now somewhere between four and six million - two thirds of the Palestinian people - living outside the borders of historic Palestine.
In many ways I think of my friend Hassan as a typical Palestinian refugee. His…
One of the few glimmers of hope in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict in recent years has been the growth of a movement of international solidarity with the Palestinians calling for a just resolution to the conflict and utilising the techniques of nonviolent direct action to oppose the Israeli occupation, the best known example of which is the International Solidarity Movement (ISM).
Activists from around the world - many from the US and Britain - have travelled to the…
The recent death of Edward Said robbed the Palestinians of their most eloquent advocate in the West. One of the most committed and articulate of Palestinian allies still with us however, is the Professor of International Law at Illinois University, Francis A Boyle. Boyle has produced a tool for the reader “to go out and work for peace with justice for all peoples and states in the Middle East”.
While eschewing polemic for an analysis that is rooted in international legal principles…
For all its failings, it's sometimes worth reminding oneself that some of the best journalists (as well as some of the worst!) work for the corporate media. Amira Hass is one such reporter.
The daughter of survivors of the Nazi holocaust, Hass was, until September 2002, the chief West Bank and Gaza correspondent for Ha'aretz, Israel's leading liberal daily. Between 1993 and 1997 she lived in Gaza - the only Jewish Israeli journalist to have done so - covering the Oslo “peace” process…
International Solidarity Movement activists have been taking action with local Palestinians against the ongoing construction of the “apartheid wall”. (ISM point out: “The officially stated reason for building the `security fence' is to prevent the unauthorised passage of Palestinians out of the West Bank. However, the route of the so-called `security fence' does not follow the internationally recognised pre-1967 borders of the State of Israel”.)
The wall has recently gone up around…
